1/8/2024 0 Comments Milky way candybarIn the meantime, the building on Washington Avenue in the North Loop, where the Mars candy empire got its start, has a plaque on the outside commemorating its special place in Minneapolis history. He is buried in a mausoleum at Lakewood Cemetery in south Minneapolis, along with his second wife and son Forrest. Mars eventually came back to his Minnesota roots. So that was 1934, so really it was like five years after he left Minneapolis." "He was probably traveling out east, but he ended up dying in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins Hospital after a 10-day illness he had, which was attributed to heart and kidney disease. In 1929, Mars moved his company to Chicago for better national distribution, where it would eventually become one of the largest candy makers in the world, adding other iconic items like Snickers, 3 Musketeers, M&Ms and Twix.īut Frank Mars only got to enjoy his success for a few years before he died in 1934. Production of the Milky Way moved from Minneapolis to Chicago in 1929. "That was the first place they had to go." They called it the Milky Way house because they would get full-sized Milky Way bars and anything Mars was putting out," Kullberg said. "The story from some of the children, who are much older today, they loved going to there for Halloween. Even though Mars only lived there three years, his mother-in-law stayed in the home for nearly a decade after that. Mars used some of that money to buy a home on West Minnehaha Parkway that was known by the kids in the neighborhood as the Milky Way house. It was a lot today, but it was really a lot of money, so therefore there was a claim it was successful." "It was under a million dollars, but still when you are talking the ‘20s, that was a lot of money. When it was introduced in 1923, the candy bar's sales were out of this world, making $800,000 its first year, which would be about $11 million today. Mars called his new creation, The Milky Way, after the malted milkshakes that inspired it, not the star system as many people believe. "They joked around and said, ‘Well why don't you put this in a candy bar?’ That gave him the idea that he came back to Minneapolis to do that." "After he gets bailed out, they were sitting in a soda shop and having, the story is, having malted milkshakes," Kullberg explained. Mar-O-Bar, one of Frank Mars' first creations (FOX 9)īut it wasn't until his estranged son Forrest, from his marriage to his first wife, called his dad to bail him out of jail after getting in trouble with the law in Chicago, that Mars would come up with the idea that would put his candy company on the map.
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